Communist Party makes a comeback ... in Japan

steveox

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A smiling, smartly attired 30-year-old woman sits at an expansive table in a meeting room decorated with simple elegance on the fourth floor of a modern office building in central Tokyo.
Only the sunflower broach – an anti-nuclear symbol – on the woman’s suit, and perhaps that the large calligraphy scroll on the wall behind her that isn’t hung perfectly straight, betray the fact that this isn’t a scene from corporate Japan. Yoshiko Kira doesn’t look like she intends to dismantle capitalism, but this is the headquarters of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), and she is one of its rising stars, and that’s her plan

When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party cemented its grip on power with a victory in the upper house elections on July 21, the unlikely other winners were the Communists. Ms. Kira was one of the party’s newly elected lawmakers who saw the JCP raise its representation in the House of Councilors from six seats to 11, giving it a large enough bloc to propose legislation. She was the first Communist to win in the five-seat Tokyo constituency in 12 years, while another young JCP candidate won in Osaka, the party’s first victory there in 15 years. Overall, the Communists came in second to the ruling party in terms of votes collected in Japan’s two giant metropolises.

http://news.yahoo.com/communist-party-makes-comeback-japan-134436281.html

Even the japs dont like capitalism. Cause it benefits the wealthy.
 
Werbung:
AJ201307220071M.jpg



Miss Kira is a vivacious 30-year-old woman, which may be why she could win a historic victory for the JCP that now holds more than 10 seats in Japan's upper chamber. Fringe parties often gamble on young and appealing-looking candidates to make an electoral breakthrough despite their lack of qualifications. But this strategy did not work out for Australia's One Nation, which withdrew the party's young rising star's candidacy after a controversial media interview.
 
A smiling, smartly attired 30-year-old woman sits at an expansive table in a meeting room decorated with simple elegance on the fourth floor of a modern office building in central Tokyo.
Only the sunflower broach – an anti-nuclear symbol – on the woman’s suit, and perhaps that the large calligraphy scroll on the wall behind her that isn’t hung perfectly straight, betray the fact that this isn’t a scene from corporate Japan. Yoshiko Kira doesn’t look like she intends to dismantle capitalism, but this is the headquarters of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), and she is one of its rising stars, and that’s her plan

When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party cemented its grip on power with a victory in the upper house elections on July 21, the unlikely other winners were the Communists. Ms. Kira was one of the party’s newly elected lawmakers who saw the JCP raise its representation in the House of Councilors from six seats to 11, giving it a large enough bloc to propose legislation. She was the first Communist to win in the five-seat Tokyo constituency in 12 years, while another young JCP candidate won in Osaka, the party’s first victory there in 15 years. Overall, the Communists came in second to the ruling party in terms of votes collected in Japan’s two giant metropolises.

http://news.yahoo.com/communist-party-makes-comeback-japan-134436281.html

Even the japs dont like capitalism. Cause it benefits the wealthy.


It isn't capitalism that benefits the wealthy. It is the crony capitalism, or corporatism. Capitalism is good for the consumer, not so much for the corporation.

As to Japan, one might consider its past, and wonder if the US will not go the same route:


http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013...ns-abenomics-salvation-is-already-a-fail.html

Abenomics didn’t start digging that hole. That happened years ago, gradually, through a thousand cuts and structural changes by Japan Inc., the same process that began in the US decades ago, namely offshoring production. But Abenomics is digging the hole at a more furious pace.

The weaker yen did drive up exports by 10.1% in May from prior year, but imports, which now have to be paid for with the same weaker yen, rose 10.0%, from a much larger base!

China has become Japan’s largest trading partner, and largest export market. They might hate each other and needle each other and step on each other’s toes while they dance around their various disputes, island issues, and historic massacres, but they do trade. And the trade deficit with China soared 34.8% in May to ¥410 billion.

Trade with China involves having to jump through some murky hoops, including transshipments through Hong Kong, which skew the numbers. To correct for that, we look at China and Hong Kong combined. That way, the trade deficit with both was only ¥78.4 billion. But it nevertheless jumped 29%. Part of the relentless deterioration – from May 2007, when there was a trade surplus of ¥318.5 billion.

It was a continuation of the same song: exports to Hong Kong and China rose 14.0%, but imports rose even more, 14.7%. Just how important are these two trade partners? Over a quarter of Japan’s total exports end up there, and almost a quarter of its total imports come from there.

Like its US counterparts, Japan Inc. has become expert at offshoring. Part of the motivation is the greener grass on the other side of the pond, namely cheap labor. But increasingly in huge markets like China, there has been an even more powerful logic: companies want to be closer to their customers.
As Japanese manufacturers have set up shop in China and other countries, their Japanese suppliers are under pressure to be closer to their customers. The auto industry is a prime example: when Honda sets up production plants in China, its Japanese suppliers increasingly end up following, lest they lose that business to Chinese suppliers, which many of them do anyway. Some of their products, particularly components, filter back into Japan. A type of offshoring that cannot be reversed by monkeying around with the currency.

So the usual suspects, rising imports of crude oil and LNG, have been blamed for the trade deficit, and they’re up, but the entire category of Mineral Fuels inched up only 2.7%. They’re not the big culprits.
 
Why you think people voted for Obama? Now just because hes black. Because people wanted to soak the rich and crackdown on banks and the stock market. If that's not true then,,,What was OWS all about then?
 
Why you think people voted for Obama? Now just because hes black. Because people wanted to soak the rich and crackdown on banks and the stock market. If that's not true then,,,What was OWS all about then?

Are you saying the banks were not guilty of fraud, that Wall Street was not bailed out and is still being propped up? "Soak the rich"? The "rich" gained 12 trillion in wealth while the middle class lost 7 trillion.

People voted for Obama because they were sick, and tired, of the Republicans propping up one class at the expense of the other. I grew up in the 50's, and 60's (born in 44), and I remember how it was when the CEO was happy to get 40-50 times the salary of his average employee, not the 200-400 times they are getting now. When a person could buy a house on a persons wages, and most often it was the father.

The OWS was about "income inequality" something the Founders feared, and is now promoted by Republicans, and government. You might think Obama is a Marxist, however, Ron Paul was correct when he called him a corporatist.
 
Look whats happening in Detroit


Point being what? I could go into a deep dissertation explaining why income inequality is contrary to the teachings of Christ, Jefferson, or numerous others. However, could you accept it as such? Just think about this. How do you eliminate welfare when you suppress the ability of the multitudes to earn a living where they can afford to provide for themselves?


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/b...-take-toll-on-growth.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

WASHINGTON — Income inequality has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression, and the recession has done little to reverse the trend, with the top 1 percent of earners taking 93 percent of the income gains in the first full year of the recovery.

The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots — and the political questions that gap has raised about the plight of the middle class — has given rise to anti-Wall Street sentiment and animated the presidential campaign. Now, a growing body of economic research suggests that it might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation in the years ahead, as well.

“Growth becomes more fragile” in countries with high levels of inequality like the United States, said Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund, whose research suggests that the widening disparity since the 1980s might shorten the nation’s economic expansions by as much as a third.

Reducing inequality and bolstering growth, in the long run, might be “two sides of the same coin,” research published last year by the I.M.F. concluded.
Since the 1980s, rich households in the United States have earned a larger and larger share of overall income. The 1 percent earns about one-sixth of all income and the top 10 percent about half, according to statistics compiled by the respected economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

http://keepthemiddleclassalive.com/quotes/

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
- Louis Brandeis

“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.
- Thomas Jefferson, (Founding Father)

“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” (The Republic)

“The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues — not faction, but rather distraction — there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth.”
- Plato, (427-347 B.C.)
 
Here is something else for you to think about. Also, just as another thought, should I explain how globalism is destroying America?


http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/22/income-equality-killing-capitalism

This analysis, while seemingly plausible, depends on the belief that it is the supply of credit that is essential to economic health: too much money ruins it, while too little destroys it.

But one can take another view, which is that demand for credit, rather than supply, is the crucial economic driver. After all, banks are bound to lend on adequate collateral; and, in the run-up to the crisis, rising house prices provided it. The supply of credit, in other words, resulted from the demand for credit.

This puts the question of the origins of the crisis in a somewhat different light. It was not so much predatory lenders as it was imprudent, or deluded, borrowers, who bear the blame. So the question arises: Why did people want to borrow so much? Why did the ratio of household debt to income soar to unprecedented heights in the pre-recession days?

Let us agree that people are greedy, and that they always want more than they can afford. Why, then, did this "greed" manifest itself so manically?
To answer that, we must look at what was happening to the distribution of income. The world was getting steadily richer, but the income distribution within countries was becoming steadily more unequal. Median incomes have been stagnant or even falling for the last 30 years, even as per capita GDP has grown. This means that the rich have been creaming off a giant share of productivity growth.
And what did the relatively poor do to "keep up with the Joneses" in this world of rising standards? They did what the poor have always done: got into debt. In an earlier era, they became indebted to the pawnbroker; now they are indebted to banks or credit-card
 
Look whats happening in Detroit

1004794_514665108606158_1193192220_n.jpg

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Detroit got EXACTLY what it deserved. The racist, corrupt, socialist policies put in place by Coleman Young have finally come full circle. Even to this very day, the Detroit City Council is busy petitioning the DOJ to file civil rights charges against George Zimmerman instead of working on their own financial woes.

Their racism and hatred has consumed them and their city. I have no sympathy for groups like this, be it the KKK filing for bankruptcy after losing all of it's assets and HQ's to Beulah Mae Donald or Detroit filing for bankruptcy.

Racism, corruption, and socialist/communist policies will always FAIL and Detroit is the poster child of that example.
 
one can opine that it is some evil plot that enriches the wealthy and crony capitalism is more rampent here that ever before, but there has been a change in the rest where they have ceased to strive to better themselves. miraculously enough they have ceased to better themselves. /scarcasm

liberal policies always gave the same effect.
 
one can opine that it is some evil plot that enriches the wealthy and crony capitalism is more rampent here that ever before, but there has been a change in the rest where they have ceased to strive to better themselves. miraculously enough they have ceased to better themselves. /scarcasm

liberal policies always gave the same effect.


Perhaps you can point to some source that shows where Americans by, and large, have lost the desire to improve their lives. If you want to speak of "policies", the policies of the right to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, while using globalism to insure that the average American has lost the opportunity to do so, is even more damaging. For instance, while the right whines about Obamacare do you know that of the ones that qualify for the services offered 88% are working?

What people like you fail to understand is that the Founders sought an autarky form of economy :

1: self-sufficiency, independence; specifically : national economic self-sufficiency and independence
2: a policy of establishing a self-sufficient and independent national economy
Not plutocracy:
1. Government by the wealthy.
2. A wealthy class that controls a government.
3. A government or state in which the wealthy rule.
And certainly not an oligarchy:
1. a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.
 
People voted for Obama because they were sick, and tired, of the Republicans propping up one class at the expense of the other. I grew up in the 50's, and 60's (born in 44), and I remember how it was when the CEO was happy to get 40-50 times the salary of his average employee, not the 200-400 times they are getting now. When a person could buy a house on a persons wages, and most often it was the father.

And why is that? What is your basis? Are you also including inflation, mandated government regulations, (federal, state, local) loss of industry and middle class jobs to developing countries, and a litigious society?

Many of those buying homes on one salary back in the 40's and 50's didn't have most of the above, not like we do today. The economy after WWII was booming and few went to college. Today college is almost mandatory, unless you want to be stuck in a low paying service job. I know of positions now that require a college degree, jobs that someone with average intelligence and a class in typing would have been qualified for back then.
 
And why is that? What is your basis? Are you also including inflation, mandated government regulations, (federal, state, local) loss of industry and middle class jobs to developing countries, and a litigious society?

Many of those buying homes on one salary back in the 40's and 50's didn't have most of the above, not like we do today. The economy after WWII was booming and few went to college. Today college is almost mandatory, unless you want to be stuck in a low paying service job. I know of positions now that require a college degree, jobs that someone with average intelligence and a class in typing would have been qualified for back then.

I would grant you that things are more complicated today then they were back then. However, what do you have that says a CEO today is worth 100 times what he was then, and yet the average workers wages have either declined, or remained stagnant? If the wages of the average worker had just kept up with inflation minimum wage would be over 21 dollars an hour. And even today one with a college education can be found flipping burgers at MacDonalds.

Should I explain to you how corporations actually profited from the firing of employees, and thus increased the CEO's pay?

http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/news/economy/middle-class-wages/index.html

Getting to the store costs more, too. Gas in Corinth, Miss., her hometown, costs $3.51 a gallon now, compared to less than three bucks in 2012. That really hurts, considering her husband's 112-mile daily round-trip commute to his job as a pharmacist.
Bruister, a mother of four, received a $1,160 raise this school year at her job as an eighth-grade computer teacher. The extra cash -- about $97 a month, before taxes and other deductions -- isn't enough for her and her husband to keep up with their rising costs, especially after the elimination of the payroll tax break. Its loss shrunk their paychecks by more than $270 a month.

"If you look at how much prices are going up, you get in the hole really quick," Bruister said. "It's a constant squeeze."

In the wake of the Great Recession, millions of middle-class people are being pinched by stagnating incomes and the increased cost of living. America's median household income has dropped by more than $4,000 since 2000, after adjusting for inflation, and the typical trappings of middle-class life are slipping out of financial reach for many families.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2011/06/22/disappearing-middle-class-jobs/

The recession may have just complicated and compounded what was already occurring. Generally, jobs are disappearing where there’s been a technological advance—“where a human was doing something, now a technology is doing it”–or a change in the way that organizations function, says Hallock. And not only are old-fashioned assembly line jobs on the decline, several white-collar office positions are also in jeopardy.

“There has been some long-term decline in middle-income jobs,” says Harry Holzer, Georgetown University economist and co-author of Where Are All The Good Jobs Going. “Specifically, it’s good-paying production and clerical jobs that are disappearing.”

Holzer is quick to say that though there has been “shrinkage,” he remains confident that there are many good jobs in the middle—they may just look different.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/22/the-lost-decade-of-the-middle-class/

Fully 85% of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living. Of those who feel this way, 62% say “a lot” of the blame lies with Congress, while 54% say the same about banks and financial institutions, 47% about large corporations, 44% about the Bush administration, 39% about foreign competition and 34% about the Obama administration. Just 8% blame the middle class itself a lot.

Their downbeat take on their economic situation comes at the end of a decade in which, for the first time since the end of World War II, mean family incomes declined for Americans in all income tiers. But the middle-income tier—defined in this Pew Research analysis as all adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median 1 —is the only one that also shrunk in size, a trend that has continued over the past four decades.
sdt-2012-08-22-Middle-Class-01-02.png


In 2011, this middle-income tier included 51% of all adults; back in 1971, using the same income boundaries, it had included 61%. 2 The hollowing of the middle has been accompanied by a dispersion of the population into the economic tiers both above and below. The upper-income tier rose to 20% of adults in 2011, up from 14% in 1971; the lower-income tier rose to 29%, up from 25%. However, over the same period, only the upper-income tier increased its share in the nation’s household income pie. It now takes in 46%, up from 29% four decades ago. The middle tier now takes in 45%, down from 62% four decades ago. The lower tier takes in 9%, down from 10% four decades ago
 
Werbung:
Perhaps you can point to some source that shows where Americans by, and large, have lost the desire to improve their lives. If you want to speak of "policies", the policies of the right to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, while using globalism to insure that the average American has lost the opportunity to do so, is even more damaging. For instance, while the right whines about Obamacare do you know that of the ones that qualify for the services offered 88% are working?

What people like you fail to understand is that the Founders sought an autarky form of economy :

1: self-sufficiency, independence; specifically : national economic self-sufficiency and independence
2: a policy of establishing a self-sufficient and independent national economy
Not plutocracy:
1. Government by the wealthy.
2. A wealthy class that controls a government.
3. A government or state in which the wealthy rule.
And certainly not an oligarchy:
1. a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.

refer to the state of education in America and its trajectory since the 60s. globalusm happened because what used to drive this country has been fading while being taken to heart by those outside our shores.
 
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